Tweeting is nice because it’s terse; I can update my tweeps about what I’m doing, resources I’ve discovered and articles I’ve read between more lengthy and media-rich blog posts (and to publicize those posts).

The Twitter Tools plugin is a great way to integrate tweets into a WordPress blog. The most obvious benefit of this is that it keeps the content on the blog page fresh and allows bloggers to communicate bitlets of information that do not require their own post.

In addition to other worthwhile features, Twitter Tools allows a blog admin to display recent tweets in a sidebar widget, and to automatically publish tweets in a daily or weekly digest format. Twitter Tools caches tweets in a table of the WordPress database to reduce the number of calls to Twitter.

There were a few things about the plugin I didn’t particularly like out of the box. First, there was a link below the last tweet in the sidebar widget to take a visitor to my Twitter page. I prefer to have the widget title be that link. Second, the digest post title date format was ugly: “2009-06-29″ instead of “June 29, 2009″. Third, the link at the end of each tweet in the digest post had a simple ‘#’ instead of the date and time of the tweet, which also serves as a link to the original tweet.

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development · php · plugin · programming · social networking · twitter · wordpress

How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live
Steven Johnson, Time, June 4, 2009

The one thing you can say for certain about Twitter is that it makes a terrible first impression. You hear about this new service that lets you send 140-character updates to your “followers,” and you think, Why does the world need this, exactly?

Twitter certainly doesn’t make a good first impression. The magic of Twitter happens for people after they jettison the idea that Twitter is primarily about what people are doing. In fact, Twitter is about what people are reading, talking about, thinking about, experiencing and the people to whom they are talking and meeting. It is, in essence, a huge connected conversation.

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article · magazine · social networking · time · twitter

If you think the primary use for Twitter is to tell people what you’re doing, you really do not “get it”. It’s okay, neither did I for a very long time. :)

@brentdanley's tweet frequency

The “point” of Twitter is communication. It’s active and viral.

For example, let’s suppose I find a cool website/blog post/article and tweet it. Then, several of my followers like the tweet and decide to re-tweet it to their followers. The dissemination can be exponential. Anybody can follow me and I choose who I want to follow. It’s like being at a cocktail party with the world and being able to participate in any of the innumerable conversations.

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microblogging · social · social networking · tool · tweet · tweetup · twitter